More Chilling 9/11 Tapes Released

Tapes of plaintive calls for help from the World Trade Center towers were among the items released after newspapers and families of the victims sued to get access to them.

The recordings reveal panicked people worried about their own survival. In many cases, they were promised rescue help that never came.

One was from a financial planner named Melissa Doi, who cried to a 911 operator just minutes after one of the planes struck her building, pleading for help.

“Listen to me, ma’am,” the operator tells her in a disturbing 20-minute phone call. “You’re not dying. You’re in a bad situation, ma’am.”

“I’m going to die, aren’t I?” Doi asks as the temperature rises on the 83rd floor. “Please God, it’s so hot. I’m burning up.”

“Ma’am, just stay calm for me, OK?” the operator responds.

But all she was greeted with was an eerie silence. “Not dead, not dead,” the operator is heard telling others at the command centre. “They sound like deep sleep.”

Then the phone line cut out. “Oh, my Lord,” were the final words from the disbelieving operator.

Doi was one of thousands who didn’t make it out of the building.

The call was among the 1,613 previously unreleased tapes from that terrible day in September 2001. Most were from rescue workers who were sent to the crumbling buildings in the worst emergency in New York City history.

And while the city’s fire department, which lost 343 members to the disaster, claims the recordings highlight their “extraordinary professionalism and bravery,” they also show the mass confusion that surrounded the rescue effort.

They join 130 other calls released last March and thousands of pages of transcripts put out a year ago this month. 

In most cases, the voices of those trapped have been cut out of the recordings, leaving only the responses from those on the other end of the phone.

But despite their professionalism, you don’t need much imagination to hear the fear.

“We’re in a state of confusion,” cried Chief Dennis Devlin of Battalion 9. “We have no cell phone service anywhere because of the disaster … Bring all the additional handy talkies.”

“One of the towers just collapsed,” a fire lieutenant yelled on another call. “Everybody’s got to be inside of it. … There’s got to be thousands of the people inside it. One of the towers just came down on everybody.”

“There’s heavy smoke and flames and the building management is announcing that everything is all right, and it’s not and they’re confused,” a fire dispatcher intoned after receiving a call from someone trapped on the 82nd floor.

Another operator, speaking to a victim several floors above, simply vows, “I’m going to do my best.”

“I want you to go on the floor. Kneel on the floor. On the floor,” another operator pleaded. 

And even those who couldn’t make it in to work were highlighted, their voices forever frozen in time.

“Everything is blocked,” an off-duty worker complained as she struggled to get to her post.

“Why are you crying, Carol?” asked her supervisor.

“The World Trade Center collapsed.”

“Everything is collapsed, baby,” is the eerie answer.

“All those people – what about the EMTs and paramedics and firefighters in there helping people get out?” Carol asks.

“I don’t know, sweetie, I really don’t know,” her colleague admits.

The last statement from Carol seems to sum up the whole day.  “Oh God,” she says, simply.

The families of those involved have been notified of the release as they prepare to mark five years since the day they lost their loved ones to the terrorists.

They believe the tapes will help save lives in the future.

“We’re still looking for information for how we can fix what went wrong that day,” explains Aggie McCaffrey, whose brother Orio Palmer was among the firefighters who perished in the disaster.

Some relatives believe that instead of reassuring them, the 911 operators should have told them to get out before the buildings collapsed.

At least 2,749 people perished that day, the worst mass slaughter in North American history.